Misinformation remains a considerable problem across the world, undermining everything from our collective response to climate change to the very essence of democracy itself. Research from DePauw University suggests that racial resentment plays a major role in whether people believe conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation. This is especially so when the issues concerned have a racial element, such as the origins of Covid.

The researchers explain that climate change also has a racial element, as it’s widely reported that the economic, social, and health impacts of climate change tend to fall disproportionately on poorer, non-white communities.

Endorsing misinformation

The researchers examined data from the 2020 edition of the American National Election Study, with a particular focus on whether people endorsed misinformation on various scientific issues, together with their confidence in various views, such as that vaccines cause autism; that global temperatures haven’t been rising; and that Covid was intentionally developed in a lab.

The results show that when issues had a racial element to them, this was strongly associated with the acceptance of misinformation and the level of confidence in such misinformed beliefs.

“Our work shows how the uptake of misinformation may not only be the result of knowledge and partisan identities but may also be affected by intergroup prejudices for certain issues that are viewed through racial lenses,” the researchers explain. “While this paper only studies misinformation about a few scientific issues given the limitations of the dataset, we hope subsequent work examining the relationship between racial prejudice and misinformation may look at how racial prejudice may both contribute to misinformation uptake about other issues, and also make such misinformation more difficult to correct given the deep-rooted nature of such prejudices.”